How New Zealand Customs uses intelligence and technology to battle rising drug smuggling at the Port of Tauranga. Video / Mike Scott
There are plenty of ways to smuggle drugs, cigarettes, firearms, and other illicit substances into New Zealand, including hiding them in a container or on a ship. However, dedicated Customs officers are working hard to locate those items before they can make it off the boats and on to the streets. Hannah Bartlett goes behind the scenes to see what it takes to keep our borders secure.
Jamie Hickey, Customs port manager in Tauranga, says there are a few things that make a good Customs officer: perseverance, determination and doggedness.
An officer also needs to be curious and have a “real desire to get to the bottom of it”.
That desire, combined with good intelligence, co-operation with other authorities, and a lot of hard work, is what keeps our borders safe, often preventing large quantities of drugs, firearms and other illicit items from ending up on New Zealand streets.
Since 2020, Customs has seized more than 5167kg worth of cocaine and 6241kg of methamphetamine at our borders. Officers have also intercepted 32,597,487 cigarettes and cigars, 23,475kg of loose tobacco, and 839 firearms in that time.
In 2022, New Zealand’s biggest cocaine seizure - more than 700kg - was discovered at our largest port, which sits on the Tauranga harbour and covers two sites - Sulphur Point and Mount Maunganui.
It’s a location that’s become increasingly busy for Customs officers in recent years and there’s little sign of that slowing down.
“In the last probably two years we have intercepted more here than probably the previous 20 years,” Hickey told NZME during an exclusive visit to the Port of Tauranga.
Customs port manager Jamie Hickey overlooks the containers at Port of Tauranga. Photo / Mike Scott
Between 2017 and 2024, 1240kg of cocaine was seized in Tauranga, compared to 504kg of methamphetamine seized in the same period.
Of the cocaine, 1172kg was seized between January 1, 2022, and mid-2024, including a record 725kg in one hit.
“Customs intelligence and targeting indicators identified the container shipment had left South America in January 2022, so we were ready for it when it arrived in Tauranga in February 2022,” Hickey said.
“As you can imagine, being a part of the single largest cocaine seizure in New Zealand at the time was a larger-than-life moment for the team. Knowing that you’ve been a part of something that prevented over hundreds of millions worth of drug harm to our communities makes us proud and keeps us going for the work we do.”
1.2 million 20-foot equivalent units came through the Port of Tauranga in the year ended June 2024. Photo / Mike Scott
In the year to June 2024, 1427 vessels came through the Port of Tauranga, carrying 1.2 million 20-foot equivalent units (a standard measure of shipping containers). That equated to 23.6 million tonnes of cargo being moved across the wharves.
Hickey’s team is tasked with making sure any illicit substances are found before they get into the hands of criminals.
While not everything can be searched, there is a targeted approach to what warrants further inspection.
Profiling is done based on intelligence received from other agencies, including police, Customs’ own investigations team, and offshore intelligence agencies.
One of the key considerations is where the ship and its cargo have come from.
New Zealand Customs is using international intelligence and technology to battle rising drug smuggling at the Port of Tauranga. Photo / Mike Scott
“We’re seeing a lot of cocaine come through here,” Hickey said.
“Primarily because the Port of Tauranga has one major service, and another one that’s less frequent, that comes direct from South America.”
Hickey said attempts to breach security and get into the port complex itself to retrieve the illicit product, had also increased, as had the quantity of seizures.
Three people were arrested and charged following the investigation into the largest cocaine shipment ever to reach New Zealand shores.
Looking for something that’s ‘not normal’
Hickey said the drug-seizure process involved a mix of technology, intelligence, skill, and tenacity on the part of the Customs team on the ground.
It begins with a “work queue” – a list of containers Customs plans to scan through a large X-ray.
Customs uses large X-ray machines to detect drug smuggling. Photo / Mike Scott
“Our X-ray truck can scan a 40-foot container in less than 30 seconds and give us an indication of what’s inside.”
Customs officers sit in a small, dark office – a Portacom of sorts – looking at screens that show a scan of what’s in the container.
A scan image during a 35kg cocaine seizure in 2023.
The officers know what’s meant to be inside – on the day NZME visited, they were scanning a container of timber - and what’s not.
“[The officer’s] just looking for something that doesn’t look like timber...” Hickey said.
“The framing of the containers is fairly standard, so something that doesn’t quite look right can stand out, but again, it’s a tool... it won’t say ‘ah it’s cocaine in the top corner there'.”
When illicit product is concealed in a shipment, often those sending it attach an Air Tag so they can track it.
So Customs officers use a tool to scan for Bluetooth trackers, walking around outside the container, checking to see if the device will ping.
“If we start getting readings from that [device]... it’s indicating to us there may well be an Air Tag inside that container. That becomes of heightened interest to us. It’s something else that’s not normal.”
When something seems off, the container is taken to a warehouse where Customs officers can look inside. There, it’s often up to the officers’ “doggedness” to find what may be concealed.
Customs officers know what is supposed to be in shipments and are looking for things that appear out of place. Photo / Mike Scott
Illicit substances can be hidden within materials, making them challenging to find and requiring both heavy-lifting and perseverance in dismantling items.
But there’s also another smaller X-ray machine, similar to the ones used at airports, that officers use to examine items.
“It takes a suitcase-size object,” Hickey said.
“So if we’re pulling something out of a container, and we want a secondary X-ray image, which is actually really good so we can see a bit better what’s inside, we use that.”
Customs officers also have a laser-type device - a “fingerprint machine for chemicals” - that can be pointed at a substance, even through plastic, to get a reading on its composition.
Thanks to all those tools, officers are usually very clear on what they are dealing with after finding something suspicious.
“But when it comes down to the guts of it, you’ve got a 40-foot container jam-packed with a whole lot of different types of boxes... it’s down to the staff on the floor doing the hard yards that will find it.”
Customs port manager Jamie Hickey and supervising Customs officers Glenn and Jarrod at the Port of Tauranga. Photo / Mike Scott
‘We can’t be naive about it’
The Customs team has key relationships with Port management, something that is key to managing the risk of port workers themselves.
“I don’t think there’s any need to avoid the discussions about trusted insiders and the fact that there are people in a position down here that can influence and have an effect on the supply chain as the cargo moves through,” Hickey said.
“It is a concern for us and I think generally speaking for every Customs jurisdiction probably in the world... we can’t be naive about it.”
Customs can access the port’s cargo system and place holds on any containers of interest, preventing that container from leaving the port.
“We can do it covertly, we can do it overtly. If it’s covert, there are only a few key people on the port that will know anything about that.”
The other part of their work involves what’s called a “rummage”, where Customs officers board a vessel and search the ship itself.
Every vessel has a “risk assessment”, often based on what areas it has been in recently, and can even include cruise ships that dock on the Mount Maunganui side.
“Rummaging a cruise ship is very, very difficult,” Hickey said.
“But there is some targeted activity we’ll do. Each [passenger] basically gets a risk assessment done...”
The rummages happen without warning as if the crew gets wind one is going to happen, “anything on board could disappear”.
It is a big job, given the size of the vessels and array of “hiding places”.
“Part of it is a deterrent too. We don’t give away too much of what we’re going to search, or where we search, or why.”
With all these search methods at their disposal, the team found things regularly at the Port of Tauranga, Hickey said.
“It would be between weekly and monthly at a very rough [estimate]. Sometimes it’s more than that, sometimes it’s less.”
Hickey said it kept them busy, but noted it was not always about drugs.
“When you look at the duty that’s on tobacco at the moment, there’s an illicit black market in that as well. So there are lots of different things that we can look at and find.”
Illegal cigarettes discovered during a ship "rummage" at the Port of Tauranga.
A kilogram of meth for $130k
National Organised Crime Group director Greg Williams said police and Customs were dealing with “an evolving transnational organised crime environment”.
Criminal groups looked at “systems like shipping and how can they evade the processes to get their products in the containers”.
Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, of the National Organised Crime Group, says transnational organised crime is continuing to ramp up the supply of drugs into New Zealand.
Part of the work being done by the Port of Tauranga, and Customs at the port, was about making the port itself and its supply chains more resilient.
“What you see in Tauranga, when we seize or do a big seizure... there is a whole raft of work occurring collectively overseas to basically attempt to prevent the ability for that stuff to get in there in the first place,” Williams said.
Williams and Hickey agreed the main driver for the drugs coming in was the high street value in New Zealand.
Williams said methamphetamine and cocaine used to primarily come from Southeast Asia, where large meth labs were running out of Myanmar. But now much of the drug supply was through the Mexican cartels.
“In Mexico, you can buy a kilo of meth for US$500,” Williams said.
“And it’s still selling here in New Zealand for $130k... it costs them nothing to make it, and they are just dumping it on us.”
He said the cartels put people in key places as “transformational brokers”.
“We call them transformational because they are the big brokers sitting over big lots and big shipments, so they can move whatever you want, wherever you want it.”
Local gangs were often the receivers of the product - at the “retail” end - but there were also cells of the overseas cartels who set up their own supply lines within New Zealand too.
Given the cartels had diversified their production across the world, and were “just ramping this up exponentially”, it called for police and Customs to “rapidly evolve their response,” Williams said.
“That involvement is not just Customs and police but bringing in the partners, the private sector and the ports and those companies at the border to understand and tell them what’s really going on so they understand it themselves, because the private sector is pivotal.”
The goal was “to make New Zealand the hardest place in the world for organised crime and their networks to do business,” Williams said.
“When you start to see businesses being impacted because products are being inserted into food items coming into our communities, it’s chilling stuff.”
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
